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BEST OF BEST OF THIS WEEK THIS WEEK, Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre

Photo by Chris Phipps
March 22, 2023Martίn Hernández – Stage Raw Following in the satirical footsteps of Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, this Open Fist Company production takes the past year’s cream of the crop of its Thursday night comedy sketch show, This Week This Week, and skewers our calamitous society with mostly hilarious results. Creator and director Ron
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TWELFTH NIGHT At The Broadwater Studio Theater

Photo courtesy of Foolish Production Co.
March 22, 2023Tracey Paleo – BroadwayWorld Notwithstanding that they fell into many textbook Shakespeare traps, and that there was zero chemistry between any single one of the characters, the Foolish Production Company cast actually knew what they were doing. And mostly their 1-hour rendition of TWELFTH NIGHT (playing in rep with MEASURE FOR MEASURE at The Broadwater)
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CARDENIO at City Garage Theatre

Photo by Paul Rubenstein
March 22, 2023Rob Stevens – Haines His Way City Garage, the resident theatre company at Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station Arts Center, built their thirty-plus year reputation for doing heavy lifting with productions of Greek tragedies and the works of Brecht and Beckett among other dramatists. With their latest offering, Cardenio, they prove they can let down their
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THE THIN PLACE, Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre

March 22, 2023Harker Jones – BroadwayWorld Tony-nominated playwright Lucas Hnath’s THE THIN PLACE is an eerie meditation on grief, regret and the need for closure, though it is undermined by the lack of a satisfying conclusion… Obie Award- and Outer Critics Circle Award-winning Hnath (“Red Speedo”; “A Doll’s House, Part 2″) carefully delineates each character with precise
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ONCE at Laguna Playhouse

Photo by Jason Niedle
March 22, 2023Socks Whitmore – Stage Raw In Dublin, a struggling Irish musician bumps into a young Czech woman and his life changes forever. This is the premise of the 2007 musical film Once, and likewise the stage musical of the same name, both featuring songs by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová (including the infamous “Falling Slowly”),
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TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES, 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum

Sabina Zúñiga Varela. Photo by Craig Schwartz Photography.
March 22, 2023Dana Martin – Stage Raw Center Theatre Group meets the moment with Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, conceived, written and revised by Anna Deavere Smith. The original production premiered on Broadway in April, 1994. Smith wrote it as a solo piece, which she developed from hundreds of interviews following the 1992 L.A. uprising. This updated version
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THE LONELY FEW at Geffen Playhouse

Lauren Patten. Photo by Jeff Lorch.
March 18, 2023Patrick Chavis – LA Theatre Bites World Premiere: The Lonely Few @ Geffen Playhouse – 8 out of 10 – Good Show! LA Theatre Bites Recommended! More… Jonas Schwartz-Owen – Theatermania The Lonely Few, a world premiere rock musical at the Geffen Playhouse, does away with conventional narrative. It immerses its audience in rock clubs
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Archive for Samuel Beckett

ENDGAME at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Monday, May 16th, 2016
Photo by Craig Schwartz

Photo by Craig Schwartz

Myron Meisel – Stage Raw

Moments before heading out to witness Alan Mandell’s staging of Endgame at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, just before sundown, I lit my first yahrtzeit candle to commemorate the first anniversary on the ancient lunar calendar of the death of my father. Leaving it to burn in my absence permitted me to approach Samuel Beckett’s 1957 classic with suitable sobriety about mortality.   Read more…

Dany Margolies – The Daily Breeze

What does a director do for a play? The writer writes the words, designers make the show look a certain way and the actors flesh out the rest, right? Well, yes and no, of course. Read more…

Now running through May 22

 

 

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I’LL GO ON at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Thursday, January 16th, 2014

Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly

ign

Photo by Craig Schwartz

“That’s the story!” repeated with droll unctuousness becomes a motif in actor Barry McGovern’s solo performance of stories by Samuel Beckett, presented by the Gate Theatre of Dublin at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. The texts — “Molloy,” “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable” — were selected by McGovern and Gerry Dukes, and the show was directed by Colm O’Briain.
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Bob Verini -   ArtsInLA

An interesting irony about Samuel Beckett is that while he wrote brilliantly about everybody’s anguish, that writing is hardly to everybody’s taste. This is especially true of his seminal trio of novels from the 1950s, variously dealing with man’s relationship to death and the infinite. Malloy; Malone Dies; and The Unnamable are long, dense, and largely unparagraphed, tough for even the most fanatical of English majors to work their way through.  Read more…

Hoyt Hilsman  -  Huffington Post

Prominent Irish actor Barry McGovern, who is considered one of the leading interpreters of the work of Samuel Beckett, performs texts selected from three of Beckett’s novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. While Beckett is best known for his stage works, the novels reflect the bleakness of Beckett’s world view and his obsession with language. Read more…

Jonas Schwartz – TheaterMania

After dazzling audiences as Vladimir in Waiting For Godot in 2012 at The Mark Taper Forum, Barry McGovern has returned to Center Theatre Group with I’ll Go On, a two-act monologue pulling excerpts from Beckett’s three novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, now playing the Kirk Douglas. McGovern is triumphant as three displaced title characters who luridly mull about death and sex. Read more…

Now running through February 9.

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Krapp’s Last Tape, CTG at the Kirk Douglas Theatre

By LADCC critics · Comments (0)
Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging

 

Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett.

 

Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA

Samuel Beckett’s melancholy one man, one act play is being performed superbly by John Hurt in his first appearance on a Los Angeles stage, at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, in a production imported from the Gate Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Much like Clint Eastwood waited until he was sufficiently old and grizzled enough to play the aging gunslinger in Unforgiven, Hurt seems to have arrived at the perfect point in his illustrious career to portray the decrepit Krapp. At 72, the Oscar-nominated British actor is actually a fraction older than the character (69). Hurt’s hair is short, spiky and powdered grey, his teeth appear rotten with a front one missing, his face is sagging and lined with the deep creases of a long life and Hurt even limps and leans on a walking stick throughout, at times grunting with the effort; the cane was still in use during opening night’s enthusiastic curtain call.   Read more…

 

 

Bob Verini – Variety

If there’s a bleak truth to be unearthed about the human condition, you can be sure Samuel Beckett peerlessly expressed it. His 1958 tiny masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape is about the impermanence of memory — about how our recollections desert us just when they’re most needed to soften the blow of reviewing life’s disappointments. The emphasis on humor in Michael Colgan’s visiting Gate Theater Dublin production, executed by the brilliantly talented John Hurt, makes it easier to swallow Beckett’s bitter pill. Read more…

 

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